Fans cheer for them and ask for autographs. Crowds number in the thousands – a sellout crowd of 5,604 rocked the Savannah Civic Center for Saturday night’s major attraction of Georgia-Georgia Tech. For a brief time each year at the Savannah Tire Hockey Classic, these college student-athletes are athletes first, and they are thrilled.

“Savannah’s as big as it gets for all the teams in the SEC,” University of Florida defenseman Scott Schwartz said before the 14th annual event last week. “We look forward to Savannah every year.”

For the rest of the year, they are students first, and they’re happy with that, too. Schwartz is a junior accounting major, for example. Georgia Tech’s Ryan Fritz is studying environmental engineering. Florida’s Jared Bishop has a double major of marketing and sports management. South Carolina’s Kevin Kjetley also is in sports management. (I detect a trend.)

People probably ask about their major, but rarely, if ever, what position they play on the team, because people don’t know there is a team.

“I hear that a lot as a coach,” said Tracy Jacobson, Florida’s first-year coach. “When people ask what I do, they say, ‘I didn’t know Florida had a hockey team.’

“There’s definite interest there. The awareness of the sport is not close to football.”

Because it’s club hockey, the teams represent their universities but have few, if any, of the resources that varsity teams enjoy. That includes the lack of athletic scholarships, of course, and facilities on or near campus.

Florida State’s squad travels to Columbus, Ga., for ice time. The Georgia Ice Dogs play at a rink in Duluth. The Gators exit Gainesville for Jacksonville, where Jacobson lives and works at his day job as owner of a sporting goods store.

When the team has a practice, Schwartz said he and teammates typically leave campus around 6:30 p.m., start practice at 8:30 p.m. and get back to Gainesville by 12:30 a.m. – and this is on school nights. No professor would accept this as an excuse for sleeping in the next morning.

Not having a true home rink means few fans come to their Jacksonville games, and “it’s a huge burden on us” in terms of recruiting players, he said.

Building team chemistry is harder, but Schwartz, the team president and captain, notes there’s “a lot of commitment on the team. Players do a good job. Academics come first.”

The club hockey players at Florida and the other schools have to work hard to squeeze games and practices around classes, studying and other realities of college life.

They must love hockey that much, meaning their experience in Savannah is that much more rewarding. And playing and winning for their school, what Schwartz called “the rah-rah” aspect, makes memories for a lifetime.